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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t know how anyone can consider erectile dysfunction a vanity ailment. I hear extremo feminists talk about viagra as an evil medicine for rich white men to rape more with, and it’s incredibly offensive to me. It’s right up there with saying that abortion is for wanton sluts who want to fuck without consequences. Come on folks. It’s not that hard to just agree that proper sexual function is one aspect of health, and that everyone has a right to it.



  • Yeah I thought the same so it’s good to see the numbers. I don’t think people realize that to support a search engine means letting them crawl your pages which means serving all your pages to them, which costs server resources. A lot of sites get more crawler load than load from actual users viewing pages. It’s a real cost.

    Still, you’d think they could manage to support DuckDuckGo at least. Or a small set of search giants to give some appearance of supporting competition.


  • The king doesn’t ride in the vanguard. Being a leader doesn’t mean being way out on the fringe of your group.

    When Pelosi moves, everyone moves. She farted 1.5 times and got Biden to step down and the entire party to back Harris. She knows how to move her party as one. She knows when she has the votes for something. She’s old and should retire but it’s a shame because she’s the most skilled politician I think many of us have ever seen, and the fact that few notice it only underscores the point.

    No one in this thread has shit to teach Nancy Pelosi about reading the room.


  • I don’t think we are disagreeing. It’s like I already said: other business considerations will always win out. But it is not crazy to think that there are individuals out there within corporations who genuinely believe that DEI is a good thing. Tech companies top asset is their people, and those people are not all white males. Having an inclusive workplace is just good business. And especially when it comes to women, having an inclusive workplace fends off lawsuits. I know the CEO of our company personally well enough to know that he is a genuine believer. He was raised liberal by parents who were civil rights activists and he does not want to perpetuate America’s abysmal history of exclusion and exploitation if he can help it. This is not image control. I get very tired of people saying that this is all virtue signaling, some performance, by people who don’t truly care, for some powerful audience who do actually care. Who is that audience supposed to be?? Shareholders??? lol



  • Rather than thinking of it as a cynical farce that was a total lie, can we think of it as perhaps a genuine impulse which was not strong enough to override other business considerations, and which most companies fumbled, and which no company was willing to make material sacrifices for when it came right down to it. I genuinely think a lot of people would like to see true equity at work, but they have no idea how to bring it about, they are too outmatched by other cultural forces, and ultimately they can’t make a convincing business justification for it.

    I call it a well-intentioned but doomed escapade. Not a big fat lie.


  • The company I work for is tireless about DEI and at least the CEO is personally a big believer. I think the instant he goes, though, the entire thing goes. We have hundreds of people working on it. And they have produced more backlash against DEI than real progress on it. So yeah, there are true believers out there, but the system as a whole doesn’t give a fuck, never did, and there’s never going to come a time when we all turn some corner and want more, more, more DEI staff at work. In my humble opinion the movement is dead already and will be remembered as an artifact of the last decade or so. The actual problem itself will continue to improve, generationally, just as it has done for a hundred years.


  • I do think that lab grown diamonds will eventually end the whole diamond thing, and here’s why. The allure of diamonds is about 5% based in their objective sparkly qualities and 95% a status / wealth construct which is based around their scarcity / their artificially-maintained expensiveness. Manufactured diamonds eliminate the scarcity and expensiveness. Therefore they will not be a cultural construct that holds any status, or meaning as a symbol of wealth, for much longer. Basically manufactured diamonds have a short window when they can capitalize on cultural mores about diamonds with a cheaper product. But they themselves are destroying 95% of the allure of diamonds in doing so. Not only will mined diamonds lose value, but manufactured diamonds will too - unless they can innovate to keep coming up with cool stuff like bigger gems with cool visual qualities. Eventually they will be valued only for their objective sparkle or whatever, and the rest of the status game will cease to exist. You can see that this has already taken place for many people in this thread. Surely, certain rich people are still paying a premium just to know that their diamond is mined. But eventually fraud will undermine that, and yes even some guilt about mining practices. Rich people will have to move on to some other status symbol. But it takes time. Concepts of how weddings are supposed to go do not change quickly, in part because parents have a lot of say in how their kids’ weddings go, and this bridges the generations and keeps old mores alive. To a degree. But anyway yeah kiss this whole diamond thing goodbye pretty soon here.



  • Serious answer: I think it’s a worrying sign of the times if anyone thinks of political violence as anything other than abhorrent. The reasons they might: he’s stacked the highest court in the land with hacks who’ve handed him immunity. He’s succeeded on the back of lies and smear tactics. So he’s killed truth and justice, and he’s just getting started. His party have gerrymandered themselves into a perpetual obstructionist role that makes a mockery of democracy.

    He’s a convicted felon and Russian asset who is about to be elected president. How far can we be taken into dystopia before “abhorrent political violence” becomes “absolutely necessary revolutionary action?”





  • My fear about UBI over the long term is that it will just get baked into prices and stop having a beneficial effect. Basically inflation. Inflation is what happens when money is devalued. And if everybody suddenly all have this magic same amount of money dropped out of the sky, who’s to say that anything fundamental in society will change? All the basic supplies and demands will still be there, so will there just be slightly different digits on all the price tags? What does that solve? Anyway, you shouldn’t expect a government to go STRAIGHT to UBI without some shorter term one-time stimulus experiments. So let’s hope it goes well and inspires more experimentation instead of saying hey stupid why didn’t you make it permanent? There are some obvious questions about how that would go.


  • Look, I’ll be straight with you. “Universal Basic Income” is in substance the same thing as “handouts.” The only difference is in the tone and connotations of the phrase you choose to use. “Handouts” has overwhelmingly negative connotations of “free stuff for lazy people,” while “Universal Basic Income” has connotations of a futuristic economic policy that will solve a lot of societal problems.

    You can use many words to describe something like this. Stipend. Dividend. Stimulus. Welfare. The dole. They all walk the same but each carries different baggage.

    So I think the person above you was a little silly to say it’s NOT a handout. Sure it is. But it’s a humane and well planned handout designed to reduce suffering and stimulate the economy -not the unwashed masses robbing the country blind.

    Let’s all just say what we think of such policies instead of letting connotations do the work for us.

    Personally, I’m excited to see any program like this of such a size, and especially in a country I have been to and know a little about. Let’s see how it plays out. UBI could be awesome and it could be a blind alley where the funds just cause inflation and the benefits are short lived. We have to see.